Greg van Brug

Pretty recently, I had to add a “Site last updated” feature to the footer of a Word­Press site. Now there’s a couple of plug-​ins that will do this auto­mat­i­cally for you but if all you really need is the date of the last update, all of these plug-​ins are a little over the top. Believe it or not, every­thing you need is built right into WP in the get_lastpostmodified() func­tion. And with a little more PHP we can take this value and format it any way we like.

Let’s have a look…

The WP func­tion get_lastpostmodified() retrieves the last time a post was modi­fied. But that’s it, it just retrieves the value. To get it to show up, just echo the function.

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<?php echo get_lastpostdate(); ?>

You now should have some­thing like this:

2009-11-10 11:38:47

That’s the raw date format from the data­base, but with a little more PHP we can take this value and make it pretty. As you prob­a­bly can guess, we’re going to use the PHP Date function.

Here’s our code:

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<?php echo date("F j, Y", strtotime(get_lastpostmodified())); ?>

Ok so what’s all that…

We call the PHP Date func­tion with date — pretty obvi­ous, I know. Next we tell it what format we want — I’m using F j, Y but there’s a lot more ways you can output this — check the func­tion refer­ence to find the format you want. Our exam­ple will give us a format like this: Novem­ber 13, 2009. The impor­tant parts of this are the alpha­betic char­ac­ters; commas, dashes, spaces are optional.

Next we use the Word­Press func­tion get_lastpostmodified as a value for strtotime. The strtotime takes then takes our value, expects be a US English time­stamp and then tries to parse it to a UNIX time­stamp. The UNIX time­stamp then can be format­ted with our F j, Y and the date func­tion tells it how to be handled.

No clunky plug-​ins to manage, just a single line that does it’s thing. Pretty simple right?

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